“Make your life into brand.”
This was the advice of my graduation speaker at the mediocre liberal arts party school I attended. At the time, I wanted to vomit. Not because I had just popped and guzzled a bottle of champagne in the campus courtyard at 10 a.m., but because I was ready to go out and conquer the system, to offer it all my unique millennial gifts, and this woman was telling me to turn my life into a logo.
I had no idea that, in a few months, I’d be sobbing on a milk crate in the back room of a shitty food and beverage job, pleading to the cosmos to reveal to me the point of my existence.
I graduated in 2009. The economy had just crashed a year prior. Stock brokers were jumping out of the windows of Manhattan skyscrapers. Our own Great Depression was on. Mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations were not yet part of my vocabulary. All I knew was that something called the real estate bubble had burst. And so had my expectations. In typical, entitled millennial fashion, I had assumed the world was going to roll out a red carpet for me. And then I slowly began to realize that, in fact, the world disapproved of me, as a millennial.
I had no qualifications to do anything and just about zero life skills. I spent that summer pitching stories, working for free— thinking people were doing me a favor for giving me such wonderful opportunities—and binge drinking almost every night. And then I got my first job as a barista—the occupation de jour of millennial, misanthropic English majors. I worked three other side hustles, made roughly seven thousand dollars that year, and was lucky enough to be able to cash checks every month from my parents to pay the rent. I broke down twice from nervous exhaustion and contemplated becoming either a nun or a train hopper to avoid the responsibilities of a real world filled with mean people.
I wasn’t alone in this impasse of identity. Millennials suffer from high rates of apocalyptic anxiety and existential doom. This was only amplified during the Great Recession. According to a study by the American Psychological Association, we have the highest perceived amount of stress of any living generation. Our stress is existential, interpersonal, and also financial. Millennials feel so depressed about the future that it’s challenging for us to function day to day. We struggle with the idea that our entire value and worth are dependent on how well we perform in a toxic society. We’re constantly comparing our lives to others. We’ve been taught to pretend that we’re happy even when we’re not. And we don’t know what to do about the fact that we’re unhappy.
It’s a lot of work to build self-esteem, especially when you can’t stop thinking about how your hands are stained with blood and how every footstep contributes to the problems that will cause the human race to destroy ourselves. Pretty much everything we buy contributes to the enslavement of someone on the other side of the planet. Every year, our tax dollars subsidize dirty fossil fuels and wars in the Middle East. We may love going to the beach, but those sea levels are starting to rise as ice caps melt. The worst part of it all is that while we’re getting screwed over by a rigged system, we still need to write our authority figures thank you notes so can we use them on our resume as references in an increasingly competitive job market.
THE UNGLAMOROUS, PAINSTAKING PATH OF THE DREAMER
“Not losing hope in humanity has been my greatest challenge. Not losing hope in the face of how man treats man, believing that we can all be good and genuinely want happiness for each other.”
—Peter Meli, twenty-six, screenwriter
Young people usually first attempt to solve our identity crises by hinging it entirely on what we do—and whether or not we’re successful. But the truth is that many people succeed by failing—and failing a lot. I’ve had to learn that the strength of my sense of self relies more on my ability to fail and keep persevering than it does on the outcome of my efforts. Sometimes, allowing yourself to be average and to develop at your own timing is the healthiest approach if you want to succeed at anything in the world.
I’ve seen it with my peers time and again: so much of our self-image hangs on how powerful and influential we can be or whether we’re able to fulfill our childhood dreams. And we’re stressing ourselves out.
Like most creatively inclined millennials, Peter grew up dreaming of making a life in the arts. He was born with significant hearing loss, and his mother and speech therapists spent hundreds of hours teaching him how to speak. Unfortunately, we live in a world of ableism, where Peter’s schoolmates would make fun of him for wearing a hearing aid and being different. He desperately searched for someone to believe in him so he could believe in himself, and soon he found his gift when an English teacher told him he had a writing ability. He also began to excel at sports.
Peter was accepted into Dickinson College on a football scholarship that he later walked away from to study film at New York University. He says he felt torn between the two worlds of athletics and the arts. When he graduated from Tisch, he threw himself into writing his first screenplay, “Magda’s Last Words.” It is based on the diary entries of an old, tattered journal of a Holocaust survivor that his father stumbled across. Peter was transported into this world of history, violence, and redemption of the human spirit. Writing this manuscript was a way to give his life purpose.
“I want to feel like my place in the world is worth something,” he says. “Humans aren’t organisms randomly wandering around. We have to have a sense of meaning, and it has come from within. We wouldn’t be the most intelligent creatures on the planet if we weren’t meant to communicate who we are with the world.”
Years after completing “Magda’s Last Words,” Peter is still shopping it. Inside the pages are depictions of the Second World War. The narrative asks the kind of questions that tragedies like war bring up in the collective consciousness: Why are we here— to fight or to love? How do we deal with the aftermath of tragedy and brutality? Why do humans do horrendous things to each other?
For now, Peter makes his money working as a production assistant on movie and TV show sets in Los Angeles. He spends his time getting directors coffee and sweeping floors. He doesn’t find this work meaningful, but he’s positioning himself in the right kind of environments in order to make the connections so his voice can be heard. He knows he’s capable of doing more than mopping floors. But he’s grown content with working his way up. He sees companies chewing up young people and spitting them out, and he knows that he could become disposable like the others, but he’s holding on to his purpose for dear life. Peter says he’s following his dreams so he can one day teach his children to follow their own. It’s what life’s all about, he believes.
Peter has found something that he’s passionate about. He knows that his parents made certain sacrifices so he could do what he’s doing today—pursuing what he loves. Maybe the baby boomers “sold out” so millennials wouldn’t have to—and perhaps it’s not even about selling out; it’s about “buying in.”
IT’S OKAY . . . TO BE POOR, HORNY, AND CONFUSED
Your twenties just may be the most emotionally unstable period in your development. You may never be as poor as you are now; you may also never be hotter or hornier. You may never have to deal with more rejection in your life or be as simultaneously self-righteous and confused as you cobble together crumbs of personal achievement to form a veneer of competency to present to others. It’s also a time when you can focus on doing the kind of inner work that will turn you into the kind of person who can change the world.
This decade of life, the one that falls between adolescence and adulthood, is my current focus. Psychologists call this time period “emerging adulthood,” which spans the ages eighteen to twenty-nine (and sometimes later). It is defined by the joys and perils of personal freedom. We’re exploring identities and getting as many experiences as we can before we make big, committed choices about love and work. We’re discovering our interests, lifestyle preferences, and the many options that exist for us in this big, wide world.
Millennials are not afraid of change—whether it be our partners, career paths, or living situations. In fact, we often seek out change during this time when we have less obligations to others. We’re solo agents and can finally steer our own ships. We get to make our own decisions, and we also have to learn to meet our own needs. We get to envision what a worthy adult life might look like. And most of us believe that, one day, we will manifest it.
Jeffrey Jenson Arnett, PhD, a psychology professor at Clark University, was the first to propose that this demographic is unique from all other ages. He observed that young people are no longer quick to settle down. We aren’t teenagers anymore, but we aren’t acting like conventional adults either. We’re burning through jobs and locations and lovers, delaying duty and obligation, valuing our own liberties instead and learning experientially. We are spending more time in school and accumulating more debt. We’re loudly expressing ourselves through art, music, and other media. We are staying financially dependent on our parents for longer than ever. We are challenging the status quo. Arnett thinks that this prolonged adolescence is a natural evolutionary, adaptive response to social changes— increased demand for higher education, the advent of birth control, and economic competition.
This is a relatively new phenomenon. Young people didn’t act out like this until the 1950s, with the emergence of social liberalism. First, there were the Beatniks. Then, rock and roll. The hippie movement started in the sixties. Music and messages of anti-war, revolt, and love spread through TV and the radio. People were beginning to talk about the existence of a benevolent universal consciousness, outside of the construct of religion, an energetic reality of unity. Then there was disco in the seventies, hip hop in the eighties, and grunge in the nineties. Throughout these last five or six decades, it has been a rite of passage for young people to scream, “Screw constrictive and oppressive traditions! I shall not do what you tell me!” We’ve created our own subcultures that push people to their emotional edges. For decades now, the youth has created different collectives of artistic and spiritual resistance to the historical period of oppression we’re living in.
Arnett admits that his own emerging adulthood was filled with frowned-upon delays and fun-filled sidetracks such as hitchhiking, working as a musician, and traveling while earning his doctorate.
“I didn’t want to assume conventional adult roles,” Arnett says. “I knew the freedom I had was fleeting, and I was right. I think it’s wise for people to make use of it.”
His advice is to sow your wild oats before dropping anchor. Now Arnett has a family, a career, and a mortgage, but he got to it all in his own way, in his own divine timing. He can empathize with the subjects he studies.
Psychologists who study emerging adulthood say that this phase of life is characterized by instability, insecurity, a feeling of being in-between states, and extreme self-focus, all fueled by the ideation of multiple future possibilities. It’s also a time when more than half of us will suffer from anxiety and about a third us will be clinically depressed. According to a study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five is when most people suffer from thoughts of suicide and will make a suicide attempt. Almost 9 percent of young people wish they were dead. The society we live in doesn’t prepare us well for life.
Then, a breakthrough happens. I’ve seen it. We find something—anything—and learn to take care of it. For Peter, it was a screenplay. For myself, it was writing a book, and, more important, learning how to take care of myself. To root down, so I can bear fruit; and to commit to life, because I (like you) have something of great value to contribute.
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